Case Planning

The opening chapter of Pretrial Litigation orients students to the full arc of civil practice before they specialize in any one piece. It covers case planning as a discipline — assessing client needs, applicable law and facts; crafting a theory of the case; making realistic time, cost, and fee predictions; and managing the AI tools now embedded in modern practice. Substantial sections introduce credibility analysis, legal reasoning, client interviewing and counseling, and the fundamentals of negotiation, mediation, and arbitration as alternatives to litigation. Particularly suited to a first-year civil procedure or pretrial litigation course where the goal is to give students a working mental model of how cases actually proceed, the chapter functions as a professional-formation reading rather than a doctrinal reference.